Here at USAReading.club we wish to encourage and inspire our visitors to read American novels. To do this, we will share a list and introductions to a variety of American well-known novels. Please click on the list below to access information about some of America’s best known novels.
- American Novels: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- American Novels: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- American Novels: Of Mice and Men
- American Novels: The Grapes of Wrath
- American Novels: The Great Gatsby
What are American Novels?
The American novel is a genre of literature. It typically has a setting in the United States and is written for an audience in the U.S. There are many forms of this genre, including realism, romance, science fiction, fantasy, crime fiction, Westerns, and so forth. The focus on the U.S.
Over the past few centuries, many great American novels have been published. Some of these novels are widely read and taught across the United States as a part of “American Studies” curricula. Examples of these novels include Abigail Adams’s “Novels of Early America” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter”.
A strategy that is often used by American novelists is that of allegory. One can find examples of this strategy in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter,” Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” and John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.
American novels are characterized by a strong sense of self-identity, which is usually derived from being educated, having a job with social status, and being part of the middle to upper class.
For the past few decades, american novels have been experiencing a shift in their fundamental dynamic. This phenomenon has been marked by what many scholars call postmodernism. Postmodernism is marked by the rejection of grand narratives that carry universal truths and instead favor particularized accounts of individual experience. It rejects the idea that one story can be perfect for everyone and instead favors the notion that every person interprets stories for themselves.
We can understand the term “American novels” in two different ways. One is to see it as a genre of literature, where authors are drawn to tell American stories, but with universal themes. The other way of understanding “American novels” is to imagine it as a category of books, which are being published by men and women of North America.
The American novel is the vernacular of American literature. It is a type of prose fictional narrative that typically narrates the adventures of an individual in the United States. The novel has been defined as “a fictitious prose narrative, with close ties to both realism and romanticism, which can be described either in willful or involuntary autobiographical or quasi-autobiographical terms.